Primetime might be the best movie starring Robert Pattinson secretly concerning 9/11 since Remember Me. Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime features Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the host of To Catch a Predator, but the film focuses less on Hansen in specific than one would expect. While he’s still the movie’s central figure, Oppenheim’s portrait of Chris Hansen and the nature of To Catch a Predator parallels the paranoia embedded into American society post-9/11 more than it exemplifies Hansen’s sensationalist tendencies.
Three years after 9/11, To Catch a Predator premiered in 2004. Primetime places itself in 2006, near the end of the show’s run. The film is a period piece situated in the mid-2000s with every accuracy accounted for: Fergie, flip-phones, Subway’s Jared and constant coverage of the Iraq War.
Initially, the audience sees Dateline NBC news anchor Stone Phillips (Bill Heck) report the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Right after this clip, Hansen runs into Phillips in the NBC building, and Phillips condescendingly compliments Hansen, who begrudgingly thanks him. Once this moment passes, Phillips as a direct rivaling force also leaves the story, and the two never interact again.
His presence, and his wider coverage of the War on Terror, are never true motivators for Hansen’s ambitions to be a surpassing force. However, Phillips and his reports of Hussein’s trial return while Hansen does seek out bigger, more spectacular predators.
The images of Hussein are not the only repeated signs of the War on Terror. Osama bin Laden’s face is seen as the target in the police practice room just before the climatic ending raid on the last predator of Hansen’s show. This raid is also staged like the reports of SEAL Team Six’s raid on bin Laden himself.
The most obvious callback to the War on Terror comes right out of Hansen’s mouth. Before the last raid, there’s a moment of hesitation from the decoy who needs to lure out Hansen’s target. Hansen repeats George W. Bush’s “you’re either with us, or against us,” which the former president used in his launch of his anti-terroism campaign. While the U.S. leader had specifically said “you’re a terrorist if you weren’t with ‘us,’” Hansen says the decoy must be aligning himself with the predator if he refuses to do his part.
Terrorism and pedophilia are obviously distinct crimes; neither director Lance Oppenheim or screenwriter Ajon Singh argue otherwise. However, by positioning the War on Terror with reality television and associating the word “terrorists” with “predators,” Primetime does convey a shared political fantasy between the two threats.
There’s a fantasy that danger can be identified and eliminated before it reaches you without exploiting yourself or others in doing so. The sexual predator and the terrorist are both invisible but pre-existing enemies: an ever-present anonymous threat that commands surveillance and preemption in the name of prevention.
“In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection,” says Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
To Catch a Predator reifies Foucault’s visibility as a trap into visibility as a punishment. Once identified, the threat of a predator cannot remain unseen; it presents itself as chatlogs, voice messages and finally, on video. The spectacle of the scaffold becomes the spectacle of the television, and Oppenheim's Hansen echoes this:
“There used to be a pillory in every civilized town. Now, there’s television in every home.”
The pillory and the television do not serve as vehicles of justice; guilt is pre-determined by the time whoever is guilty is on display. The display is entertainment, and the entertainment should capture the viewer.
“We need the spectacular, the best of the best,” Hansen says when he realizes To Catch a Predator needs to increase viewership.
He starts looking for what he calls a “whale,” a predator referred to as a creature he can catch and parade. Hansen becomes an Ishmael-type, cataloging the search for a true vessel to blame for the evils he’s against. When this whale threatens to escape, Hansen is willing to manipulate everything around him to get it.
Like there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there’s no perfect whale for Hansen to catch. Still, the paranoid search for an internal enemy remained. The PATRIOT Act and all its associates won; there’s no discerning against the surveillance culture around us anymore. Most people don’t even notice it.
Primetime depicts the apparatus of predator-baiting and hunting as public justice masquerading as voyeuristic pleasure. It asks us to look at the ugly truth of a moral crusade being based on some form of falsification. Hansen’s predators or America’s terrorists may have been threats, but the people who took them down were liars. The only American certainty is to push forward, believing in a mistaken sense of morality.
